I did some listening tests last night using lame v3.13.
I decompressed the mp3 files (using mpg123 0.59q) onto a CD and
played them on a recent stereo, using decent headphones for
analysis. My ears are still fairly young (i'm 24), although I'm
sure they got slightly zapped with all the nightclubs i've been
going to lately :-)
The sound file used was an extract from Around the World by
Daft Punk. I'll put the wav file on the web and let you know the
location.
Anyway, using normal playback, sound quality at at 128 kbits
was very good, but different than the original in a way which
I could not figure out - it just didn't feel the same.
At 160 kbits I could not tell the difference.
Using the sound expander function on the CD player, things
started to sound quite different. The expander, a common
function on today's decent stereo systems, makes the music sound
more spacious - as if the room was bigger and the speakers were
more powerful... I guess it adds some sort of echo or delay,
probably frequency dependent.
At 128 kbits there was a very noticeable distortion - the
clapping like noise after a drum beat was severly distorted -
a "bubbly" sound, similar to the effect one gets when encoding
anything at 64 kbits. The high frequency "organs" also
sounded distorted - they didn't have smooth transitions.
At 160 kbits these distortions were gone, although the
music still sounded a little bit different.
I hope this helps! Let me know if you need more info about
these tests.
Cheers,
conrad
Conrad Sanderson - Microelectronic Signal Processing Laboratory
Griffith University, Queensland, Australia
http://hive.me.gu.edu.au/
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